Tradenotes

Pictures of an entire factory under camo netting during WWII.

My ancient Toshiba cable modem (DOCSIS 1.0!) has been acting strangely (occasionally having 30-80% packet loss, etc.) for a few months now, and gave up the ghost about a week ago. I kind of knew this was coming – when we moved into this house 2 years ago, the only reason the Cox guys were willing to hook it up to the cable line was that it’s serial number was still in their system.

I bought a replacement (Linksys BEFCMU10 ver. 4 – DOCSIS 2.0) a short while ago. It works fine, but the neatest thing about it is when connected to fast sites downloading big files (system updates, video, etc.), I’m getting > 1.2MiB/s. I think this has something to do with Cox’s “Speed Boost” feature which ups the data rate for a short time under certain conditions. One other benefit is that the new modem has a diagnostic page up at http://192.168.100.1, which may prove useful sometime in the future.

Note to self – don’t start watching cute cat and/or rabbit videos online unless you have hours and hours to spend…

Speaking of cats, Lionel managed to con me and Amy into feeding him twice this morning, in flagrant disregard for his diet (he’s around 18-20 pounds, which is too much for a cat his size). Often, he’ll bug both of us for food indepenently when we come home in the evening, as in “oh, you’re home now, feed me!” even if he’s just been fed. We switched to diet food that you can only get from the vet, and that seems to be working – he doesn’t bug us about eating as much as usual.